Avenue

Professor Michael Samuels

‌Professor Michael Samuels (1920–2010) announced his intention, at a meeting of the Philological Society in 1965, to begin the thesaurus project – a decision that was met with “scorn, ridicule and disbelief that we thought the project possible” in some quarters. Forty-four years later, vindication came when the thesaurus was published to worldwide acclaim.

Known as an innovative teacher and leading linguistics scholar, Professor Samuels’ work also included the examination of thousands of medieval manuscripts, resulting in the publication of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. ‌

• More about Michael Samuels
  

Professor Christian Kay

‌Joining Professor Samuels on the project in 1969 was the formidable Christian Kay (1940–2016), who featured in Avenue 62 as one of our 20 inspiring women.

“Christian loved words, and she loved classifying,” remembers Professor of English Philology Jeremy Smith.

‌“She was awesomely intelligent and had the imagination to be an ‘early introducer’ of computers in support of research in the humanities. I’m not sure she or any of the editors knew it would take as long as it did, but she would have done it anyway. She was an inspirational leader.” Professor Kay took over as director of the project when Professor Samuels retired, and was a key figure in securing funding to allow it to continue.

• More about Christian Kay

Professor Jane Roberts

‌‌“I kept quiet for years about what I was up to,” reflects Jane Roberts, remembering the sometimes cynical reception which the announcement of the thesaurus project provoked. She began indexing word meanings from the standard dictionaries of Old English in 1965, which were to be used as a research tool for the thesaurus project.

“When Michael Samuels first described the project to the then small department, I found it exciting. But I had no realistic idea then how long it would take.” Professor Roberts taught at King’s College London from 1969 but remains involved with the thesaurus – the editor with the longest tenure.

Irené Wotherspoon

‌Professor Samuels accepted Irené Wotherspoon onto the project as a young postgraduate student in 1967.

“The thesaurus was something different to what anyone else had done; it sounded really visionary and wide-ranging, and I was absolutely hooked, from the start,” she says. “Every day you were coming across different things and every day there was something really, really interesting, though also slightly frustrating because of time constraints – you would see something you would madly like to investigate, but couldn’t take the time to follow up. But it was a wonderful job – I loved it.”